I am been using LDD (Lego Digital Designer) for my latest NXT project and noticed a major delay in building and making instructions for my Projects (My Mindstorm projects contain well over 500 pieces) and the instructions look all weird for my big projects. And LDD is discontinued so I doubt Lego will make an EV3 update.

I am curios if you guys know any paid or free software that allows you to make projects for Lego (Mindstorm). I am looking for something fast, (optional) that will work for Mac and PC, have animation to present my projects, and finally make instructions for my projects.

"And LDD is discontinued so I doubt Lego will make an EV3 update." The DESIGN byME service was discontinued January 2012, but I believe Lego Digital Designer is still being supported.
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Ambo100♦Feb 3 '13 at 14:26

4 Answers
4

I believe that the most popular are MLCAD and LeoCAD. I personally use LDD, so I can't speak to the quality of the instruction generation from these tools, but they do at least offer the ability to create instructions.

LeoCAD is probably your best bet for doing animations, but I don't think that it has a Mac version. I believe that it is just Windows and Linux.

It only works in Goolge's Chrome browser as it is essentially an experiment to show off Chrome's WebGL capabilities.

There is no download as it is completely browser based and it also gives you an easy way to share your builds with other users and view builds for other users around the world.
Using location tagging you can actually place your build on a specific area of a google map and see your creation rendered in 3D in place.

There is also another solution called Mecabricks which is online based and works with WebGL. Therefore, you only need a browser to start building or check the 3D models already published by the other builders. However it is not compatible with LDD or Ldraw and part library is different and doesn't include as much parts as the others yet.